Shilo Brooks
The Free Press
Excerpt: Last year, our reporter Frannie Block told me about a lecturer at Princeton who was teaching a class on “greatness,” firmly rooted in the classic books of the Western canon. He would open his course by telling students that if “the greatest thing, the best thing, the noblest thing about you on your deathbed is that you got into Princeton, you didn’t do it right.”
His name is Shilo Brooks, and when I got to meet him myself, we spoke for hours about the problem of America’s lost boys, the dramatic decline in book-reading, and how those two things are connected. So I am thrilled to announce today that we are launching his brand-new podcast Old School, which is about books and how reading them can make us better.
By Tal Fortgang ‘17
What is an Ivy League university? The simplicity of the question is deceiving. Everyone knows what Harvard is. Except increasingly, no one does – not the students who attend, and certainly not the administrators who shape the institution, thereby answering that question every day.
Isaac Barsoum
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: On Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, Sunrise Princeton, alongside the Princeton Progressive Coalition, organized a rally of more than 100 demonstrators. We called on the University to act as a leader by defending life-or-death climate research, divesting from weapons manufacturers to end the genocide in Palestine, protecting immigrants and international students, and safeguarding academic freedom in a time when rising authoritarianism threatens progress across the world.
As a lead organizer for this rally, I learned an important lesson: Princeton students care a lot about progressive change, and are willing to publicly display their support because they’re optimistic that their actions can make a difference on a policy level. They just feel like they’re too damn busy.
Annabel Green
Princetonians for Free Speech
Excerpt: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise, follows protagonist Amory Blaine, who enjoys a particularly affluent life as an undergraduate at Princeton. Fitzgerald writes of Princeton: